The overlaid text at the beginning says “Background noise is unrelated to this brain or the deceased.” Which is a really rather odd way of phrasing it.
Implied is that a different body is being dissected with those saws in the background, but, I’m not sure why that strange disclaimer is necessary in either case.
It’s not the only odd thing about the video… the contextless photo of a student eating at the beginning that Maggie points out is just bizarre. And while I guess there’s nothing wrong with the Zion National Park photo at the end, it’s still a bit out of place
It certainly rings true with my experience of university science culture, where people sometimes (often) don’t realize something they did seems odd to others.
I too wish that some more information was given, like an explanation of the pocket of blood (was that related to the cause of death? is that a stroke-causing blood clot? concussive injury?) but that obviously wasn’t the fairly specific point of the video. It was still very interesting and informative.
Which parts of the animal (and of which animals) are considered edible, and indeed prime, is very much a matter of culture and tradition. Remember that there used to be a law in Massachusetts which declared it abusive to feed one’s servants lobster more than a few times a week,
Getting back to humans… I understand the reasons, but I really do wish there was more of an opportunity for non-MDs to observe a gross anatomy class. As this video demonstrates, photos and preseved specimens are not quite the same thing. And while Gunther von Hagens’s plastination exhibits (“Body Worlds”) do answer some of the questions of what things look like and how they’re actually arranged, his temptation to get artistic with his mounts is excessively distracting. (I don’t know that I blame him – there’s a long classical tradition of artistic dissection illustrations, which I think is part of what inspired him to go in that direction – but it does cause a certain degree of cognative dissonance even for those of us who aren’t bothered by the fact that he’s working with human bodies.)
When you look at any meat, you are basically looking at a dead animal. After the personality has left it, I don’t consider the human body to be much more than an oddly adapted ape; a certain respect is due to its past owner and the family thereof, but to this we all come and that concept doesn’t bother me a lot.
Surgeons, I’m told, sometimes cope with this by training themselves out of seeing the patient as anything but an animal body that needs to be repaired.
(The closest I’ve come to surgery was removing a fishhook from a seagull’s eyelid. Someone had to do it, and I wasn’t going to hurt or scare the bird any worse than it already was…)
I dunno, I kind of liked the way she stroked it at one part, like she was intensely aware that she was holding all of what once made a person who they were at one point.
Bloody cat loves my nutrient bath. Tried electrifying the table, but the cat didn’t mind and every lap of it’s tongue induced a storm of activity in me noggin – closest thing to actually feeling since the accident…
If it doesn’t mess up the nutrient bath (i.e. your life support system), try adding methyl nonyl ketone or citronella. Anecdotal evidence also suggests lion dung, but I guess that’s right out due to sanitary considerations.
